The Hashtag is well down the path to ubiquitous marketing use. One hashtag, all platforms and a common brand meme. Like it.

“If you are already using hashtags in an advertising campaign through other channels, you can amplify these campaigns by including your hashtags in Facebook advertising … Any hashtags that you use on other platforms that are connected to your Facebook page will be automatically clickable and searchable on Facebook.”

“Facebook and hashtags are two words social marketers absolutely must pay attention to,” Michael Lazerow, CMO Salesforce Marketing Cloud toldUSA Today. “The door is open for companies to better discover their customers’ immediate interests, creating the potential for increased real-time marketing based around ongoing pop culture, sports and other major events.”

Prior to the hashtag launch, Facebook also introduced sponsored, targeted posts in Newsfeed, another tid-bit of social ad prowess that it borrowed from Twitter. And we use the phrase “borrowed” pretty losely.

WPP’s moves into “big data” are a potential source of competitive differentiation. While other agencies are attempting to do this, none are attempting to nail it down at a holding company level. The potential for WPP’s agencies to share the insights and develop cross silo discipline solutions could be very powerful.

In short, “We’ll have access to behavioural data that Twitter has developed, which will be available to our media planning and buying business, to Kantar, and to our public relations and public affairs businesses,” Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s chief executive, told the Financial Times. Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter, said “marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging, and customer research”. “This partnership will benefit clients by pairing Twitter with WPP’s world-class analytics, targeting, and creative capabilities,” he said.

While much of this data is available through third parties, getting that data into a consolidated useable form, and sharing across a network is a whole other matter. And doing it outside the confines of a media agency should broaden understanding of what the various holding companies can do with the data.